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Show "Don't Squeeze the Sagebrush" say Environmentalists at Alunit site would create 1,000 jobs in Beaver County alone with a yearly payroll of 15-million dollars. "Yet we are being held up for at least another 18 months by the environmental impact review process. The project has risen in cost by $33 million dollars since July of 1974 and the corporation has committed $659,000 to environmental en-vironmental studies. I don't want to destroy the environment; I enjoy the beauties of Utah as much as the next person. But I would like someone to show me how we can hurt the sagebrush 30 miles west of Milford. 18 months is a totally unreasonable amount of time and I am asking Secretary Kleppe to intervene to speed things up. "I fear we are quickly ' reaching the point in this country where even large, financially sound businesses will have second thoughts about undertaking un-dertaking projects in which they are forced to embark upon costly unreasonable environmental review processes." U.S. Senator Jake Gam is asking Interior Secretary Thomas Kleppe to intervene personally to prevent "the fate that has plagued Kaiparowits from befalling the Alumet alunite project" in Southern Utah. In a letter to the Secretary, Senator Garn says that since coming to the Senate, he has been frustrated in his attempts to broaden the economic base of the State of Utah and provide new jobs for Utah by impractical environmental review processes." "The alunite project would accomplish two things", Senator Garn said. "First of all, it would cut down our 95 percent dependency on bauxite from outside the United States to be used in the production of aluminum. So there are sound national industrial and defense pruposes for having the plant. Secondly, the nation is experiencing ex-periencing high employment and while the Congress is appropriating ap-propriating six-billion dollars to create public service jobs, we have a company which wants to spend 400-million dollars of its own money to build this plant and create 2,500 permanent jobs, not to mention the . jobs created during the actual construction process. The' Alument project |